The stars from the film will be on deck for a viewing and question-and-answer session.

Boston’s first-ever POPaticon convention, which was going to focus around the film The Boondock Saints, was bitten by the zombie bug, and instead will become a “Walker Stalker” convention featuring cast members of the AMC series The Walking Dead.

Organizers of the summer convention said the change in the name was due to popular demand. Luckily, however, fans of The Boondock Saints won’t be disappointed, because the stars of the film will still be on hand.

Boston is known as being the central location for a lot of burgeoning activity: the best colleges, the top tech talent, and of course the world renowned hospitals. But it seems as though the city is adding yet another notch to the belt loop of accolades, this time in the form of conventions.

Anime Boston has come and gone, PAX East is creeping up quickly, and now residents can look forward to a gathering dedicated specifically to all-things pop culture. This summer, beginning June 13, Boston will play host to the first-ever “POPaticon,” a weekend-long arts and entertainment festival that will center around the 15th anniversary of the film The Boondock Saints, much of which was filmed here in the city in 1999.

James Frazier, the brains behind the event, said the concept spawned from his love for the television show The Walking Dead, and work he has done with one of the show’s stars, Norman Reedus, who plays the character of Daryl. Reedus happens to be one of the leading roles in the cult-classic The Boondock Saints as well.

“Since we have worked with Norman, we talked about The Boondock Saints a lot, and of course that’s a Boston-based film. Since it was coming up on fifteen years we said, ‘lets do the first [POPaticon] in Boston,’” he said. “It’s going to focus on general pop culture, rather than just The Boondock Saints, but that’s what we are going to start with.”

As the featured film and focus of POPaticon, organizers will show The Boondock Saints on screen and follow it up with a special question-and-answer session with the film’s stars, including Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery. Frazier wouldn’t give specifics, but he said he has also been working on roping in big name characters from shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. He said he would reveal which actors from those shows would be part of the first annual event here in the city later this week.

“We are going to have music, technology, and lots of what’s popular at the moment. The idea of the convention—although I don’t really like to call it a convention— is to reevaluate and examine what’s popular at the moment. We also want to introduce people to some things they’re not aware of,” said Frazier.

POPaticon is a sort of extension of Walking Dead-inspired conventions, called “Walker Stalkers,” that Frazier and business partner Eric Nordhoff started hosting last year. For POPaticon, however, Frazier is taking on the venture on his own.

Frazier and Nordhoff, who bill themselves as uber- Walking Dead fans, started a podcast about the show as the series started to wrap up on its third season in Senoia, Georgia. Inspired by the amount of attention their podcast received they decided hosting an event where other fans could come and talk all things Walking Dead just made sense. “We hosted an event and had 600 people show up. Then we decided we wanted to do it on a bigger scale, so we had 40 cast members in Atlanta [for the first Walker Stalker convention] and about 10,000 people showed up. From there, people were begging us to come to other cities,” said Frazier.

So they went to those cities and continued to expand.

While Reedus will be at POPaticon in Boston this summer, and possibly other Walking Dead stars will join him, this particular event will be different from what Frazier has hosted before. “It’s just going to be—it’s a different type of convention. It’s more of a boutique feel, rather than just mingling by booths, or having to wait and stand in line and sit in these massive crowds during panels,” he said. “Now we are trying to expand it into some of the other shows we love. This is a way for us to go, ‘alright, let’s bring in whoever we want to bring in.’ We’re giving it a shot. We picked Boston because it does support events like this really well.”

For more information and details about POPaticon visit the event’s website, where updates about celebrity appearances will be posted in the weeks to come.

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xojmo

15th Anniversary of a movie that was filmed here in 2009?? Does not one fact check or reread what they write anymore????

stageacter

Either they corrected it, or you misread it (I’m leaning toward the former), because it says “was filmed here in the city in 1999” now.

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